Phil Coles of the Boston Celtics and Marty Lauzon of the Atlanta Hawks share their approach to performance preparation strategies for the post-season.
A webinar brought you by our Main Partners
“I feel in the past few years, this term has become a bit of a buzzword or a misused term, thrown around left and right,” says Černivec, who is moderating this Keiser Webinar.
Her guests are Phil Coles, the Executive Director of Performance at the Boston Celtics, and Marty Lauzon, the Director of Athletic Performance and Sports Medicine at the Atlanta Hawks. The title is Performance Preparation Strategies for the Post-Season.
It just so happens that the Celtics and Hawks are currently competing against each other in the first round of the NBA Playoffs but, beyond some friendly jibes, both were happy to talk to Černivec about their post-season work with their respective teams and how their views on load management have evolved.
Misconceptions around load management
“There’s definitely some misconceptions about what ‘load management’ is in the public and in the media,” Coles tells Černivec. “The first one is that load management means rest; that player’s aren’t playing, and I think that’s a real misconception because a lot of times load management can be encouraging players to do more.
“There’s also a misconception that this is dictated by people such as ourselves, directors of performance or sports scientists and, again, I think that’s completely untrue in a practical sense. We’re people that obviously spend our lives in this space and we’re what would be considered an expert opinion, but that expert opinion is discussed with the general manager, the coaches, and decisions are arrived at for the good of the player and for the team as a whole.”
Lauzon and Coles share the challenges posed by the NBA’s hectic game and travel schedule. “If we have a common language between us as practitioners, coaching, management and the players, that is really helpful,” says Lauzon.
“It’s always about starting with ‘what does that mean?’ For a certain player, it could be rest but, most of the time, it’s something else – you’re just changing the stressor, really. It’s about having that language so that everybody understands that it’s not just rest – the player’s not just laying on the table all day.”
Preparing for the playoffs
Černivec asks Coles and Lauzon how their approaches have changed during the post-season. As Coles explains, the density of games is less during the playoffs but the intensity is higher, as is the volume, due to the player rotations getting tighter as coaches rely on certain players.
“I think that’s important as we prepare players leading up to the playoffs that we’re trying to mimic all of those things,” he says, adding that the Celtics’ roster divides into three groups for the post-season: the high-volume players, who are playing the most minutes and under the most physical and mental stress; players who are either unlikely or ineligible to play in the playoffs; and a hybrid group between the two where players may get some minutes in certain games or series.
“There is a natural spread within your 15-17-man group of seven or eight players,” he continues. “There are the guys who are on a high-volume, high-stress programme and we’re focused on maintenance and recovery; we’ve got the guys at the other end and we’re looking at a longer-term development programme than what we’re focused on during the regular season because we know they’re not likely to feature significantly in this next period; and then we’ve got the group in the middle where we’re constantly evaluating what they have done, how well have they recovered, when do we need to push them on the practice court to ensure they’re staying prepared to play big minutes and effective minutes in the playoffs, but we’re not putting them in the game when they’re tired because we’re overworking them.”
Lauzon and the Hawks have a comparable approach. “Good conversation helps with that,” he tells Černivec. “Communicating with the staff so that they know that the development group needs to get pushed and they’re going to have more court time for practice; the high-volume players spend more time in the physio groups and in recovery. It’s dialogue and communication. As practitioners, it helps us plan best for what the needs are.”
He also makes the point that the post-season affords a team more days spent in one place. “It’s helpful in the playoffs that you may be in the city for four or five days. You’re not just coming in, coming out, coming in, coming out, which happens during the season. It’s more helpful for the guys who play a lot. They have a mainstay and we can really cater to them.”
‘Don’t dismiss the coach’s eye… or athlete feedback’
Lauzon and Coles welcome the opportunities that tech and data have brought to performance conversations with athletes and coaches, but both share the belief that a performance programme should be data-informed, not data-driven.
“I’ve been surprised sometimes how a coach can tell you what he sees,” says Lauzon. “The numbers are almost a little bit of a reflection of that. It can help to say ‘hey coach, what you’re seeing looks right’. The coach’s eye is important. They see the game in a way that we don’t see it as practitioners.
“It helps us in dialogue with the player and we try to optimise from there.”
Coles points to a “bell curve” in the introduction and use of tech and data in high performance. “When it starts, there’s a lot of data that people don’t understand and don’t know how best to use. There’s fear amongst how that data will be used,” he says.
Recalling his experiences working in his native Australia, he feels that athletes and teams became too reliant on data at one stage at the expense of the coach’s eye. “We’ve now gone past that and got to a point where we can recognise what the data can do for us.
“It gives people good valid reasons to continue on the process they’re on and if it challenges what they’re doing then it creates interesting questions for people to discuss.”
The starting point is always how the player is feeling. “There’s no data that can tell us how an athlete feels as well as what an athlete can tell you how they feel,” says Coles, who also emphasises the need for mutual trust.
“That’s the feedback that when you sit down with a coach you’d say ‘this is what we can see. The player feels fine. Or the player does not feel good’. That has to be the primary point when the coach factors that into making a big decision about what happens on a particular day.”
“The wellness check-in we do in the morning is probably the biggest thing we do all day because that’s when you get your feedback from the player himself,” says Lauzon. “You don’t treat an MRI and you don’t treat data – you treat the player.”
‘Wellness check-ins have gone full circle’
Coles and Lauzon tell Černivec there is no getting away from sports as a people business.
“The mental component is just as important as the physical component, particularly when you get into the playoffs and you have a deep playoff run because the continual stress builds up over a long period,” says Coles. “And the difficulty with the mental side is that it’s much harder to be objective.
“Our data is not as good in that sense but it’s every bit as important. In fact, I genuinely think the mental fatigue that happens in a long playoff series is a greater issue than the physical fatigue given how well most of the players are prepared.”
Coles’ daily wellness checks have gone full circle. “Over time, I’ve gone through everything from very basic to really detailed and now I’m back at a really basic check-in,” he continues. “That really is a fall-back system to make sure that no one fell through the cracks and to throw up a flag to make sure that we go and have a conversation with someone if they don’t report that they’re feeling great.”
As he says, “we rely much more on the personal interaction than the particular questionnaire.”
Lauzon reports a similar experience. “We’ve been through the whole gamut where players could fill it out on an iPad or on their phone and then we were more formal with them. Now, I think we’re going back to more face-to-face, one-on-one personal interactions that starts with what’s going on in their lives first. Then you get the information you need.”
Education is a constant
Coles explains that sleep, nutrition and hydration represents 90% of Boston’s recovery programme and all are monitored using a range of objective and subjective metrics, which can then be used to educate and impart information.
“It’s not like we sit down and give a lecture to the players once a year on the importance of these things, it’s a continual part of the individual relationships they have with individual staff who are focused on that.”
“Players want to know if you’re going to scan them or force plate them – they want to know why,” says Lauzon. “If you explain it to them that’s where it starts. ‘You guys are measuring how much I’m drinking in game or how much I’m drinking pre-game’. You get player buy-in that way and they get a better sense of their bodies and what they need. It always starts with education.”
As with Coles, there is no big pre-season lecture or seminar at the Hawks. “It’s nice in the NBA that there’s 16 or 17 players so there’s a lot more touch points than on a bigger team,” he adds. Veteran players are also useful role models for both rookies and those players from overseas who may be versed in a different way of approaching preparation and recovery.
“We all have the same message and the same language so that the player gets the same message constantly from our staff. And if there’s people helping him, if the player has a personal chef or assistant, we have to educate them as well and bring them onboard with what we’re trying to do.”
The US Applied Performance Specialist Manager at Kitman Labs talks about development opportunities for female practitioners and athletes alike while exploring how workflows can be improved in both professional and college sports.
A Data & Innovation podcast brought to you in collaboration with
“The conversation has grown,” says MT Eisner, “but curiouser and curiouser: has the conversation grown because I’m in that circle or has the conversation genuinely grown?”
The US Applied Performance Specialist Manager at Kitman Labs would like to think it’s the latter. “Within Kitman, we talk about it consistently, within the other organisations that we’re helping [we ask] ‘how can we assist with this?’” she continues.
“We had this organisation want to now start tracking menstrual cycles, starting to do X, Y and Z with their athletes. ‘Who else is doing this? What conversations are you having? Who can we tap into?’ and so forth.”
In addition to the increasing focus on female athletes – and the development of female practitioners – our conversation also covered:
John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
‘How can we put our athletes in positions to be successful?’
A Data & Innovation podcast brought to you in collaboration with
“When I need to be able to understand something, when I need to be able to communicate something, when I need to be able to have that conversation with our front office or coaching staff, whoever that might be, they’re the ones that I’m going to in order to get that information.”
McDaniel is the Vice President of Player Performance at the LA Dodgers and the first guest on the People Behind the Tech Podcast series, a new collaboration between SBJ Tech and the Leaders Performance Institute.
During the course of the episode, he also talks to SBJ’s Joe Lemire and Leaders’ John Portch about topics, including:
John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
Ty Sevin of Keiser says that coaches often overcomplicate performance.
A Human Performance Article Brought to you by our Main Partners
Ty Sevin, the President of Keiser Corporation, was speaking at a lunchtime masterclass at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium.
The session, which was titled ‘Engineering Human Performance: utilising the principles of elite sport and bringing them to the boardroom’, placed Sevin onstage with Matchroom Boxing’s Head of Performance Dan Lawrence as they discussed their favoured high performance pillars, bridging performance gaps, and taking the standards of elite sports training into everyday life.
“[Performance Coach and Professor] Andy Galpin said ‘methods are many and concepts are few’,” Sevin continued, “and I feel like there’s a fundamental lack in the understanding of concept – basic fundamental principles that guide us in human performance – and more performance coaches [are becoming] dogmatic about their methods.”
Sevin, a former athlete and coach with three decades of experience at Olympic and collegiate level, was addressing the question of why coaches often overcomplicate performance. “The method is the means to the end but they don’t focus on being dogmatic about the concepts, they focus on the methods. So you have to understand what kind of engine you’re building and that totally depends on what the requirement of the sport is. And once you can simplify that, evaluate the athlete, evaluate what they have to perform on the field, it doesn’t matter what they do in the weight room if it doesn’t transfer on the field of play it’s a total waste of time.”
Physical-tactical-technical-mental
What sets apart podium-potential athletes from the rest? “There was not a physical gap between the people who won and who didn’t: it was the extreme ownership and it was the passion that they had – the soft skills,” said Sevin, perhaps reflecting on his time as the Director of the Track and Field Residency Program at the United States Olympic Committee’s Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. “It’s the relentless pursuit in many cases of going where no one had gone before.”
He highlighted specific traits: belief, consistency, compliance, hard work and dedication. In underlining his point he referenced the reflections of British Olympian Dina Asher-Smith, who spoke onstage earlier that day. “You have to have a team built around you,” he added, suggesting that community may be the most important factor behind those traits.
They all provide the foundations for Sevin’s winning “triad” of an athlete’s physical capability, tactical and technical ability and mental competency. The coach’s role is essential at that intersection. “You’re trying to address each one of those things individually and then going back to your basic concepts of ‘what does this athlete need? What are their strengths?’ Doing a simple SWAT analysis on an athlete, which is something that came from the business world that I incorporated at a very young age. You’ve got to know the strength of an athlete and what their weaknesses are; and within those three pillars you can address almost anything that happens as long as the principles are being met on top of it.”
Better coaches are better guessers
Sevin was immersed in the traditional coaching ethos of being athlete-centred, coach-driven and science-based. However, he prefers to switch ‘science’ for ‘results’.
“Science seeks answers and training seeks results,” he said. “If you look to science, you have to have pragmatic experience. The reason that coaches I think do well over time is not that the coach is so much better than the coaches they’re competing against, it’s because they have the opportunity to work with athletes over a long duration of time where they learn knowledge and they see all these different holes that athletes can have. So if you’re a young coach and you’ve got no mentor or progress and you see a hole or a deficiency in an athlete, you’re practically guessing; and as you become more experienced as a coach you become a better guesser.
“Someone asks: ‘how do you get to that level?’ It wasn’t because I was a better coach, I got involved with really good coaches at a really young age and you learn from the athletes. There’s nothing you can learn in a university setting that will help you on the field; and that’s the art of coaching.”
Sevin, who also worked as a stockbroker upon leaving college, feels that the lessons he learned in that world were readily applicable to his future coaching. “I had that foundation of understanding of how to do strategic operations planning and I applied it to an athlete,” he said. “And when you identify every criterion that’s necessary for whatever they’re competing in and you have a pretty good idea of that athlete. [You have to] test, evaluate, prescribe.
“So I test. I’m matching that test up against what the demands are of that position, that body type, that skillset, that metabolic need; what are the limb speed requirements? What are the power output requirements? What do they have to do to become resilient? That all falls in that onion of the human capabilities. You test, you evaluate, and then based on your education, based on your pragmatic experience, you implement.”
Sevin explained that he sees himself more as an educator than a coach, that he focuses heavily on the ‘why’ with an athlete. “I like it because a lot of coaches don’t know the ‘why’. They really don’t know the why, they just do it because that’s the way they were trained or that’s how their mentor did it and that’s where the dogmatic approach comes from.”
Education and communication are the coach’s trump cards. “It’s an evolution of understanding the athlete, how is your relationship with them, how do you communicate with them, but if you can identify the problem, tell them why this is hurting their performance, and have a game plan, and be honest about it and say ‘this could work or it may not work’, with the honesty and the communication you fill the gaps in over time.”
Dan Lawrence of Matchroom Boxing discusses his work in combat sports and beyond.
A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners
Dan Lawrence, the Head of Performance at Matchroom Boxing, watched his former boxer, the now-retired George Groves, learn this in real time.
“Yes, he had a team. He had myself, a conditioning coach, we had his head coach at the time,” Lawrence tells the Leaders Performance Podcast. “He was steering the ship at that time, whereas I don’t think that was the right way to go.”
In fact, “you have to have a cohesive team working with one sole goal”.
Here, Lawrence discusses his work in combat sports while also touching upon:
Dan Lawrence Twitter | LinkedIn
John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners
Gera, a former US Marine and NFL coach, is ideally placed to moderate a session that brings together Lance Stucky from US Air Force Special Operations Command, Will Lezner, the Director of Mental Performance at Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Angels, and Ty Sevin, the Director of Human Performance, Research and education at Keiser.
“I always found the one common factor between elite athletes and warriors is acceptance,” Gera continues. “Elite warriors just accept that ‘here is the bar, this is the requirement, this is the stuff I have to do in order to get there so that I don’t let my team down.’ Elite athletes love practising; and practice is mundane.”
Stucky, who also spent time working with the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, argues that few groups can meet the grit of Special Forces operators – not even athletes – but, “both expect that they’ll not only meet the standard but exceed the standard, no matter what it is. It’s that mindset of ‘I’m better than you and I’m going to prove it to you.’ Both elite athletes and operators have that type A mentality.”
As part of the Leaders Athlete Optimisation Series, the panel explored trends in the physical and mental preparation of elite performers across sport and the military, beginning with athlete signatures and wrapping up with a discussion on the transferability of training programmes in different environments.
A training ethos
As ever, the key consideration when individualising training is the demands of the task. Coaches must identify the athletic movement needed by the athlete and then reverse-engineer those demands to be able to train and test for them.
“I understand when they say the art of coaching is the pragmatic experience applied with your scientific background,” says Sevin, who has decades of experience coaching both Olympic and professional athletes.
He shared his training ethos:
‘Strength coach’ is a misnomer
In explaining his ethos, Sevin reveals his dislike for the term ‘strength coach’ and why he prefers ‘human performance coach’. “‘Strength’ only encompasses a very small portion of what we do as performance coaches,” he says, which is true when it comes to individualising training programmes.
He cites renowned management thinker Peter Drucker, who once said: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. “The process I use is a procedure many people call ‘test, evaluate and prescribe’,” says Sevin. “In my mind, that is taking the subjectivity out of it and that’s why I use signatures because I want to be very objective.”
Sevin achieves that objectivity in part through force-velocity profiles that highlight unilateral imbalances. “These play a large role in enabling people to generate force, power, and speed and it also plays a large role in the durability of athletes, and it also contributes to a lack of endurance. You can create power, force and speed baselines.”
On the theme of individualisation, he points out that on all the Premier League teams with whom Keiser works, goalkeepers have the highest velocity outcomes – more than their outfield peers. “We try to understand the key performance indicators for every sport and the improvements that specific individual needs to make to match that signature.”
Similarly, in US Air Force Special Operations, there are differences depending on role, team and mission, although, as Stucky illustrates, operators need to be prepared for all eventualities. “One team might focus more on long-range movements where they’re carrying that heavy rucksack,” he says. “They might be in austere environments for an extended length of time. How can we generate that energy system to be able to keep up with that work capacity? And can they actually be explosive and be able to move and do what they have to do tactically? I want to say that we really have to train our guys to be a jack of all trades.
“I also equate them to wresters or UFC fighters, where they’re going to have a high demand of quick spurts but then they have to be able to recover while they’re still moving. You train the energy system and musculoskeletal system.”
It is a growth area in physical performance, but Lezner’s experience in Major League Baseball is that there are currently few available tools on the mental side of athlete optimisation. Testing is banned at elite level and the only opportunities for collecting biofeedback are in scouting and developmental contexts. “That was the most tangible opportunity for them to understand, OK, this is where I can integrate some sort of arousal regulation techniques.”
Developing self-directed athletes
Having explored athlete signatures Gera steers the conversation towards those times when the athlete or soldier is away from the coach, perhaps at competition overseas in the case of sport or in various theatres of operation in the military.
Sevin explains that athletic signatures build in a level of sustainability. “[Athletic signatures] protect me and allows them, when they’re away from me, to not get caught up in listening to people on the side, he says. “It protects them when they know ‘this is my process’. They don’t have to think. I want to take the responsibility off the athlete so when they’re on their own I’m trying to keep them on target without having distractions.”
There is an educational component too. Sevin continues: “My approach is that it teaches them how to think like a coach, to understand their body and how it adapts and what the plan is.”
In sharing his views, Stucky returns to the question of baseline testing raised by Sevin. “We’ll individualise it for the unique soldier to the unique situation. At the end of the day, it’s always about controlling the controllables. There’s places that we go and we know what we’re going to have. We can actually build a programme and we can keep that in our programme bank and manipulate that for the guys when they’re away.”
For the most part, service personnel have access to well-appointed gyms while on deployment. “The biggest thing is educating the individual after the test. If we have 20 workouts or contacts, how big a relationship can we create with them to believe in what we’re doing, to have that teamwork between our team and the actual operator that we’re training and how much does he believe in what we’re doing and can he improve on that in those austere environments?”
To bring the focus back to the mental side of the equation, Gera asks Lezner about the differences in working with players at spring training versus in-season and there is a clear distinction. “That spring training period, those 45 days-plus in some cases, is critical for upskilling athletes,” says Lezner. “It’s really dependent on the staff support that you have not only at major league level but at minor league level.
“The critical juncture is when you get to in-season, now you’re working with just the major league guys. You do have dedicated time available on the road, at home, however, at that time, these guys get into their routines to the point where the operational tempo of games and everything they’re doing starts to accelerate, so if they’re not self-directive at that point you might be trying to catch up with them.
“There’s a couple of things when being proactive that are very helpful. One is to have the staff so that these players are learning these habits and behaviours at the minor leagues and doing their upskilling there. My No 1 goal for all athletes that I work with is for them to become self-directive so that I become obsolete, to an extent.”
The best do not always buy-in
To wrap up the main discussion, Gera asks Sevin if the best athletes buy into the concept of athletic signatures.
“No, actually. It’s a mixed bag. Everybody’s an individual,” says Sevin. “The greatest athletes in a lot of cases are very narcissistic. They’re just the lions and tigers of the world. They’re pretty relentless and they’re almost violent in the way that they think about things and very aggressive. Sometimes the relationships are outstanding and sometimes it’s a challenge and I don’t think I can pigeon hole one particular way to do it.”
All in all, Sevin has worked with 24 athletes who have competed at the Olympics or world championships. “They were by far never the most talented for the most part. It all came back to lifestyle, a relentless drive of placing priority on what they were doing.”
Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition
Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download our latest Special Report, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.
